Wells are generally drilled into a land surface or ocean bed to recover natural deposits of oil and gas, as well as other natural resources that are trapped in geological formations in the Earth's crust. Wellbores may be drilled along a trajectory to reach one or more subterranean rock formations containing the hydrocarbons and other downhole fluids. Information about the subsurface formations and formation fluid, such as measurements of the formation pressure, formation permeability, and recovery of formation fluid samples, may be utilized to increase well production and to predict the economic value, the production capacity, and the production lifetime of a subsurface formation. Downhole tools, such as formation testers, may perform evaluations in real-time during sampling of the formation fluid.
In working with deeper and more complex wellbores, it becomes more likely that downhole tools, tool strings, and/or other downhole apparatus may include numerous testing, navigation, and/or communication tools, resulting in increasingly larger quantities or volumes of data being generated and, thus, utilizing increasingly larger data bandwidths to communicate the data to the wellsite surface.
Communicating with downhole tools conveyed into a wellbore via coiled tubing is complicated by the rotational motion of the coiled tubing reel, which limits the number and types of data pathways available between the downhole tools and the wellsite surface. Electrical pathways support transfer of electronic data between the downhole tools and the wellsite surface, but limit data transfer bandwidth. Although optical communications have existed in the oilfield industry for years, typical optical communication systems comprise custom designs with discrete components, resulting in large footprints, high cost, low reliability, and/or limited temperature ranges.